Recently at the Lion of Blogosphere, commentator “First Ypres” (as he now prefers to be known) stated:

It’s pretty clear that the Republican Party is the party of the kids who weren’t cool in high school.

The host of the blog (The Lion), corrected him, explaining that jocks are actually more likely to be Republican.

Thinking back on all the jocks and nerds I have known over my life, it became clear to me that both men are right. Both jocks and nerds are more likely to hold certain strong conservative views. While it’s true that Silicon Valley types tend to vote Democrat, I think that’s only because their IQ’s are so high and IQ is correlated with liberalism. If you looked at nerds and non-nerds of equal IQ, the nerds might be far more Republican.

How can both jocks and nerds be conservative when they are typically thought of as being opposites? Because both jocks and nerds are extremely masculine. Jocks are physically and temperamentally masculine, while nerds are cognitively and intellectually masculine (i.e. Spatial IQ > Verbal IQ; Math IQ > Social IQ, enjoying chess & video games)

So if both jocks and nerds are Republican, who are the Democrats? Women and artsy/literary feminine guys. The kind who write poetry and joined the drama club in high school.

Does this mean liberal men are more likely to be gay? I don’t entirely think so, because there’s also the stereotype of a lot of Republican, religious, or hyper-macho homophobic guys being secretly gay. From an evolutionary perspective it would make sense for gays to support the most homophobic party they could because the more homophobia there is in society, the more gay men feel the need to conceal their identity by acting straight; the more gay men pretend to be straight, the more children they have (who genetically inherit both the genes for being gay and the genes for being homophobic).

In recent years, thanks to people like Richard Dawkins, our understanding of evolution has shifted from what’s good for the individual, to what’s good for specific genes. So a gene or allele that causes people to be both gay and homophobic would rapidly spread through the population because it would cause everyone who carries it to have more kids than usual to hide the fact that they are gay and it would create a culture where all its carriers had more kids.

So pumpkinperson has resolved the paradox of how being gay can be genetic despite the fact that gays have fewer kids. They are probably having TONS of kids, we just don’t know about it, because the gays who are having kids are the ones who self-identify as straight and go out of their way to show how straight they are by playing football and voting Republican. In other words, if you’re homophobic and live in a homophobic society, you don’t need to be straight to reproduce; social pressure is sufficient motivation. By contrast, the openly gay people are probably the most intelligent subset on average and these tend to be very liberal, perhaps especially if their sexuality was determined by prenatal events, not genes.